Posts Tagged ‘Gabrielle Giffords’

I wish this post didn’t need to be written. I wish Christina Green was still going on 10 years old, and still President of the student body of her elementary school. I wish Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords was tending to government business instead of fighting for her life in the intensive care ward of a hospital. And above all, I wish a disturbed young man hadn’t taken an automatic weapon to the parking lot of a Safeway – where Giffords was greeting her constituents – and opened fire, killing 6 people and wounding more than a dozen others.

America is awash in guns. It’s just far too easy for a deranged person to obtain an automatic weapon that is solely designed to kill people. The National Rifle Association has battled sensible gun control to the point where municipalities have to fight to pass regulations keeping guns out of schools and churches. Because gun control is a pipe dream in this country, nearly a million people die of gunshot wounds each decade, in a hail of gunfire that makes the old west seem quaint by comparison.

And so this week every slick gun lobbyist and NRA member has the blood of a 9 year old girl on their hands. Sensible gun regulation isn’t the same as wanting to get rid of every gun under under the sun, but you wouldn’t know it by the way the NRA approaches the topic. So until a bunch of gun-toting cowboys decide to take a long look in the mirror, the rest of us are stuck in a world where buying an automatic weapon is as difficult as picking up a bottle of mouthwash at the corner store. I wish it wasn’t so…